Even if you have just two websites running WordPress, you will find yourself doing repetitive tasks that really should be much easier, so in this post I am going to take a look at MainWP in action. MainWP is one of a small group of remote management systems for WordPress. The others (that I know of) are iControlWP, InfiniteWP, ManageWP, WP Central Hub, WP Remote, CMS Commander, iThemesSync and WPDash. Quite a lot to choose from. The last one, WPDash is still in beta. Based on the number of ‘active installs’ (as per the WordPress.org website) of the client plugins (most of these management tools have at least the child or client plugin on the WordPress.org free plugins repository), the top three are:

InfiniteWP (300,000+ active installs). The best deal here is the $399 for all 19 addons, but this is a one year license for updates, new addons and support. From what I can see, the subsequent years would cost half of this, $199 per year.

ManageWP (200,000+ active installs). The most functional package would cost $239 per annum for 5 sites, but this cost is annual, the more sites you have the more it costs, and it offers far less functionality than other offerings.

MainWP (90,000+ active installs). ‘The Bundle’ deal is for (currently) 24 premium extensions (the free version includes 5 more extensions) that costs $399. Not per year. This is a lifetime deal. Lifetime support, lifetime upgrades and lifetime access to new extensions. The current version is v2, and it has only been available for 3 months. It is likely that within a year it will be up there with InfiniteWP on active sites in use.

If you don’t want to serve visitors to your site the standard WordPress 404 page, this is how to customize what they see using settings in Ultimatum Theme. With this framework, there is no ‘themed’ 404 page, instead you are expected to make your own, and you should. So, what is a 404 page? Well, a user requests a page from your website but your database cannot find it and so WordPress shows this error message page.